I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for analyzing web paths. More particularly, the invention relates to systems and methods for identifying and analyzing web paths traversed by one or more entities.
II. Background and Material Information
To gain a better idea of how users interact with web pages, website owners often use monitoring software that collects data associated with individual web pages and web page accesses. This data may include web page URL or URI information, time stamp information, duration of web page visit information, visitor connection speed, page download time, a user ID, cookie ID, or other identifier of the entity accessing the page, geographical location of the visitor, and other information associated with the web page access. The collected data may be stored in a web log data file, which is typically a raw non-sortable data file that stores information regarding visits to monitored web pages. The web log data file may store web page access information for one or more web pages associated with a single website or multiple websites, and may collect the information from one or more servers or other computer systems on a network.
The information stored in the web log data file is typically used to analyze traffic data related to each individual page in the monitored website. Thus, for each page, traffic data such as a number of visits, average duration of visits, visitor location, etc., may be analyzed and used to reconfigure the page or website. Some existing systems additionally track, for each web page access, the previous page accessed and the following page accessed. Using this information, an analysis may determine how effective certain pages are at eliciting visits to subsequent pages.
Although these systems provide general analysis of individual web page access, they fail to analyze web paths traversed by individual visitors of a website. Thus, these systems do not analyze web paths from the perspective of a user, or traversing entity. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and process that analyzes data reflecting the paths taken by all website visitors, and provides information reflecting an overall visitor experience for the website.
The disclosed embodiments are directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.